Everything Deanna Raybourn

November 22, 2008

In which I am a shadow of the woman I once was

Oh, yes, it's true. I have 150 pages done--right on schedule, and this is when it begins to feel like WORK. (But it's balanced out by the feeling that this is all coming together and aren't I the luckiest girl in the world to get to DO THIS for a living? So it's not at all bad, really.) Yet it is a wee bit of a grind at this stage, and I do stupid things. Like put on 4-inch platform stiletto boots and think that I'm going to be able to walk out to my pitch-black driveway on uneven brick and not fall down. Because I didn't make it. I caught myself before my tail or my knees hit, so I didn't so much fall as crouch really fast and unexpectedly, but it is one of those supremely stupid things I tend to do at this point in the game. (My family has generally agreed that cooking and operating heavy machinery is out of the question until the book is put to bed.) On the bright side, I got to see my daughter perform in "Bye-Bye, Birdie" Friday night, and it was magic. I freely admit to a mother's prejudice here, but the kid WAS good. It's hard to be bad doing something you love so much.

And for a bit of substance, here's a little tidbit about the process for me: when I'm ready to revise, I go through my notes and pull out every detail or fact or line of dialogue I want to include. They are highlighted or snipped out and taped to the walls around my desk. Shorter snippets or general ideas are jotted onto oversize sheets of sketching paper in thick marker so I can read them easily. (If I were smarter, I would color-code them, which I plan on doing the next time.) As I incorporate each bit of information, I use a black marker to strike through it. That way I can keep track of how well I'm managing to integrate the new material with the existing manuscript. I'm extremely visual, so this technique works very well for me, even if it does leave my study looking like the lair of a weird, word-stalker type of person.

DD, a grad student in Renaissance Lit at UVA, does the same thing. Always has-she will cut her first draft apart and lay it out over tables, floor, walls-and rearrange, write up, on post-its, other stuff to be inserted using many different colors (I think it was the set of very cool markers I gave her that started that part) and use those sticky pointer things. Woe betide the careless feet or running pet that sends slips of paper flying!